Having an active email list is crucial when it comes to the success of email marketing. You would want to have a list that includes valid emails along with subscribers who regularly engage with your emails and eventually deliver conversions.
But, what happens when you find yourself with a few leads that are no longer engaging with your emails, i.e., inactive?
Well, the best option here is to run re-engagement email campaigns. You may plan creative emails to try and rekindle your relationship with leads who, for some reason, stopped engaging.
Today, you will learn about 7 creative ways to prepare re-engagement emails to try and get those people active and engaged again.
Let’s get started.
What Is A Re-engagement Email?
Often when you are in business for a while, you find several leads that are no longer engaging with your emails. You send out your emails but these prospects do not open your emails.
There could be two possible reasons this can happen.
- They do not find your emails interesting anymore.
- For some reason, they are no longer willing to receive your emails.
- They have marked your emails as spam.
A great way to handle this situation is to use re-engagement email campaigns.
A re-engagement email is an email sent to inactive or disengaged subscribers or customers with the aim of reconnecting them with your brand, product, or service. Its primary purpose is to revive their interest, encourage interaction, and bring them back into the fold of active engagement. You should consider sending re-engagement emails when you notice a decline in their interaction, such as decreased open rates, lack of clicks, or a prolonged period of inactivity.
Why Is It Important To Send Re-engagement Emails?
Sending re-engagement emails is important for ensuring you have an email list full of active, engaged subscribers. An out-of-date subscriber list containing many inactive emails can significantly hurt your sender’s reputation and email deliverability over time.
Did you know email list decay can cost you about 22.5% of your subscribers per year?
Re-engagement emails enable you to reconnect with subscribers who may have forgotten about your brand, redirecting them back into your sales funnel. Bringing inactive subscribers back into the fold gives you more opportunities to close previously cold leads and turn them into repeat, lifetime-value customers.
Left-ignored, inactive, and unengaged emails accumulate exponentially over time. Too many mass inactive emails will drastically hurt your key email marketing metrics like open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.
7 Re-engagement Email Examples To Win Back Inactive Subscribers
There could be many ways to handle re-engagement campaigns. Following are 7 re-engagement email examples that you may consider using in your campaign.
1. “We Miss You” Email
A friendly, nostalgic, and personalized “We Miss You” email works incredibly well for re-engagement efforts. Use a sincerely warm tone when reaching out to convey that you’ve genuinely missed connecting with the subscriber. Include their first name for personalization.
Remind inactive subscribers of who you are, the value your brand brings, and why they signed up in the first place. Remind them about product benefits or content offerings. Then express your desire to pick up where you left off and reconnect with them again after noticing the inactivity gap.
Include some open-ended questions to spark conversation and give them an easy opening to respond. Ultimately, the goal is to re-establish ongoing communication instead of a hard sale. You may even consider offering some sort of incentive as a “miss you” gift to make it extra appealing to re-engage.
2. Offer Exclusive Coupon Offers On Next Purchase
Special coupon codes, percentage discounts, or store credits are great ways to grab the attention of prospects. And they work pretty well in a re-engagement email. You may offer such incentives to persuade leads to become active again. Add additional details of the overall value they can get for continuous engagement such as sharing a lucrative rewards or loyalty program, current promotional offers, etc.
The idea is to make them realize that re-engaging with your emails is valuable and beneficial for more than just information or promotions. This will often convince people to start communicating with your brand again.
3. Personalized Recommendations Reminders
You may use the data of your subscribers’ or customers’ previous interactions with your brand to provide tailored recommendations or reminders.
These emails are highly effective for reconnecting with inactive users by reminding them of products or services they previously showed interest in.
Use this strategy when users have shown a history of engagement but have become inactive lately. By offering personalized recommendations or reminding them about products they viewed or left in their cart, you aim to reignite their interest and prompt them to take action.
For example, you may use, “Hi [Subscriber’s Name], We noticed you were interested in [Product A]. Here are some similar items you might love!”
You may also consider reminding them about items they regularly ordered or browsed in the past, while they were active, along with a special offer. For example, “You may love to know that [Product X] is still available. Just for you, today, you may get it at 10% off!”
By personalizing recommendations and reminding them of their previous interests, you’re providing a tailored experience that encourages re-engagement and prompts them to take the next step with your brand.
4. Limited-time Offers or Flash Sales
You may consider running a limited-time offer or a flash sale and use this opportunity to send a persuasive re-engagement email to inactive users.
In the email copy, add a sense of urgency by highlighting the limited time available to claim the discount.
To execute this approach, craft an attention-grabbing subject line like “Last Chance: Exclusive 24-Hour Flash Sale Inside!”
Communicate the urgency and exclusivity of the offer in the email body, emphasizing the limited time available for them to take advantage of the deal. For example,
“Hey there, it’s been a while! We’re extending a special 24-hour flash sale just for you. Use code FLASH24 to get 40% off on your next purchase—but hurry, this offer ends tomorrow!”
This approach will create a sense of FOMO and compel recipients to act swiftly, thereby driving re-engagement and motivating them to make a purchase within the limited timeframe.
5. Interactive Feedback Surveys
You may leverage the concept of “inclusivity” to try and make prospects connect with your brand again. To do so, you may craft interactive surveys or quizzes to encourage inactive subscribers or customers to provide feedback.
Compile an email to convey that you are seeking to understand the reasons behind disengagement and gather valuable insights to improve your products, services, or communication strategies.
This approach will make the prospect feel like you truly care about them. They will feel like they are part of your business journey and you truly want to reconcile the relationship. Some of the inactive leads will consider giving you feedback and will be eager to wait to see if you truly mean what you wrote in the email.
After that, you need to make prompt responses to their feedback and give them your plan on how you wish to improve. If they notice your proactive actions, they will now have even more trust than they had before they became inactive.
Overall, this tactic builds a great emotional connection between your brand and the inactive customers, leading to a fruitful re-engagement.
6. Sharing Recent Stories Of Successful Customers
Testimonials and social proofs are a great way to gain trust and credibility.
If you think people are disengaging with your emails due to having doubts about the benefits you promise, then sharing success stories of your customers can be a great topic for a re-engagement email.
You may craft a persuasive email to highlight the success stories or testimonials from satisfied customers. This tactic of showcasing real-life experiences and demonstrating the value and benefits of your products or services will help to make many people consider engaging with your brand again.
This approach may even lead some of the inactive leads to convert into clients.
Overall, this is a great way to leverage social proof to get marketing benefits.
7. Email Series To Warn Removal From The List
Suppose you have tried many tactics to try and ignite a re-engagement with your inactive subscribers but nothing worked.
In this case, you may go for the final re-engagement email series – a last warning before removing them from your email lists.
- Here, you may start the process 1 month before the actual removal by sending a “Warning! Your Subscription Maybe Removed!” email along with the date when you plan on actually removing them from your lists. Also, give a clear message on how to stop the removal process.
- Next, send a 2nd email 1-week before the removal with a “You still have a chance to continue receiving our emails..” message where you share the value they will miss if unsubscribed and the way to stop the removal.
- Finally, send a 3rd email 12 hours before the removal with a “Last chance to stay subscribed!” email with a final warning.
- Then, go ahead and actually remove their email and send a confirmation email to let them know that they will no longer receive emails from you, but still give instructions on how they can re-subscribe if they want to in the future.
During this whole process, many will think about the situation and consider re-engaging.
Reliable Tools To Craft And Send Re-engagement Emails
In order to send out re-engagement emails, you will need to use an email marketing tool that allows you to track customer engagement analytics, and segment them based on inactivity. Plus, you should be able to customize your emails with full control and set up email automation for inactivity.
Following are a few tools that you will love to plan re-engagement email campaigns.
1. Mail Mint
Mail Mint is an email marketing automation tool built for WordPress and WooCommerce. The plugin is designed to help you optimize your email marketing efforts through unlimited lead collection, easy lead management, fully customized email campaigns and sequences, lead segmentation, visual automation workflows, and many more.
The plugin comes with detailed analytics on your leads along with several automation triggers to easily craft meaningful email series for your prospects.
- Check out Mail Mint now.
2. MailerLite
MailerLite is an email marketing software platform designed to assist businesses in creating, managing, and automating their email marketing campaigns. With this tool, you will get various features such as drag-and-drop editors, pre-designed templates, segmentation options, and analytics to track email performance
It’s a great tool to prepare re-engagement emails for e-commerce businesses.
- Learn more about MailerLite.
3. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive and versatile email marketing automation platform that offers a wide array of features such as email marketing capabilities, marketing automation, and sales automation tools all within a single platform.
You will easily be able to trigger automation flows for various user actions and run email campaigns with personalized data.
- Learn more about ActiveCampaign.
4. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an advanced email marketing platform primarily designed for e-commerce businesses. It specializes in helping online retailers create highly targeted and personalized email marketing campaigns based on customer behavior and data insights.
It’s a great tool for preparing re-engagement emails that involve using customer behavioral data.
- Learn more about Klaviyo.
Conclusion
Winning back disengaged subscribers via targeted re-engagement emails is a crucial tactic to maintain a quality subscribers list and should never be neglected.
Apply the 7 re-engagement email examples and best practices covered in this article to craft highly relevant outreach sequences that hold high persuasiveness to win back inactive members. Building an actively engaged community full of responsive subscribers significantly bolsters customer lifetime value and long-term business success.
The bonus? Improved sender reputation and increased future email deliverability thanks to a cleaned list.
Now get out there and start re-engaging!
== FAQs ==
1. How often should I send re-engagement emails?
The frequency of re-engagement emails depends on your audience and industry. Generally, it’s advisable to start with gentle reminders and gradually escalate to more persuasive messages, monitoring subscriber responses to strike the right balance. The ideal time period is 31-60 days before sending a re-engagement email.
2. What incentives work best in a re-engagement email campaign?
Effective incentives for a re-engagement email campaign include exclusive coupons, personalized offers, and limited-time promotions. Experiment with different incentives to discover what resonates best with your inactive subscribers and encourage them to re-engage.
3. Is it necessary to create a series of re-engagement emails?
Yes, creating a series of re-engagement emails can be effective. Sending a sequence, such as a gentle reminder, a special offer, and a final warning about potential removal due to inactivity, can motivate subscribers to take action and prevent them from being removed from the list.
4. How do I measure the success of my re-engagement emails?
Success in re-engagement emails can be measured through key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Utilize analytics tools to track subscriber engagement and adjust your strategy based on the performance of your re-engagement campaigns.
